The Popes and the Emperors

As is not entirely unprecedented, I recently came across an historical fact about monarchy that is, evidently, somewhat controversial and I had no idea that it would be. This came up in response to my listing of a few facts about the history of Christianity and the Roman emperors, some of which I have talked about here before as a way of illustrating how central the imperial power was to the early Church. I was surprised, however, to receive some “push back” on the last fact I listed which was that for the first roughly six hundred years of Church history, every pope was the subject of the Roman emperors. I was told that I was “dreaming” this up but, rest assured, I am not. Evidently, this is something that needs to be talked about as, upon reflection, I think I might have an idea of where denial of this fact comes from, specifically for Catholics.

In the first place, you can check pretty much any historical source and find that the basic fact is just that; a fact. Starting with St Peter, every Bishop of Rome up to Pope Stephen II in 756 was, officially, a subject of the (later East) Roman Emperor. St Peter and the earliest bishops of Rome were all direct or indirect subjects of the Roman emperors. This was true whether they liked it or not but the fact of the matter is that they never made any objections to this. They were bound by Roman law and obeyed it so long as it did not force them to do anything contrary to Christian doctrine. They were loyal to the Roman emperors and never taught Christian people to be rebellious or called for a revolution to overthrow the Roman emperors. They did, as was written in the Bible, call for everyone to love their community, be good Romans, “fear God and honor the emperor”.

During the reign of Emperor Claudius, as had happened before and would happen again, the Jews were expelled from Rome and mention is made of this in the book of Acts concerning St Paul. Originally, the Romans considered Christians to be a sect of Judaism and St Paul, who was ethnically a Jew and a Roman citizen, became frustrated in trying to convert them and decided to accept their rejection and direct his efforts towards the Greeks and Romans. Later, in the reign of Emperor Nerva, we can see more evidence that the Christians submitted to imperial authority by the fact that they petitioned the emperor to stop forcing them to pay the tax that Jews had to pay as they were a different religion. At that time, the state still did not recognize Christianity as a valid religion but Emperor Nerva did order that Christians not be forced to pay the tax since they were not Jews. Official recognition of the Christian religion would not come until the issuing of the Edict of Milan by Emperor Constantine the Great. Later, Emperor Theodosius the Great would make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

However, even during the reign of Emperor Constantine the Great, the emperor played an important part in Church life and it is hard to imagine this would have been the case if the Bishop of Rome rejected his authority as emperor. One could also look to the Emperor Gratian who handed his title of ‘Supreme Pontiff’ over to the pope which, again, he hardly would have done if the pope was objecting to his authority. In fact, it would make no sense for the pope to accept such a title unless he first recognized that the emperor lawfully possessed it and thus could hand it over to him. Indeed, in the early days of the Church, before rules had been standardized for such a process, the Roman emperors played a part in the selection of popes. Much of the history in this period is sparse and often debated but some argue that Pope Julius I was, for all intents and purposes, appointed by Emperor Constantine the Great. It is more widely conceded that the imperial power played at least some part in the selection of subsequent popes and in efforts to resolve disputes over who the pope should be.

The underlying point though is that the bishops of Rome were by virtue of being born in the Roman Empire or, later, baptized as Christians, subjects from birth of the Roman emperors and that did not change with their election or selection for the papal throne. When the last remnants of the Western Roman Empire fell with the forced abdication of Romulus Augustulus, this did not legally change. With no emperor in the west, quite understandably, the Eastern Roman Emperor assumed sole authority for the whole Roman world and still regarded the popes as his subjects in the temporal sphere and as shepherds in the spiritual sphere (though the East Roman Emperor never recognized Romulus so that the exiled Julius Nepos was regarded in the east as the “last” West Roman Emperor until his death). This culminated in an era which I have previously heard plenty of Catholics complain about but never deny which was the so-called “Byzantine Papacy”.

This term has been used to describe the period dating from the time that the East Roman Emperor Justinian set out to take back the territory of the Western Roman Empire from the various Germanic tribes which had conquered it. Emperor Justinian, during this time, basically came to Rome, fired Pope Silverius and appointed Vigilius to take his place. As you can imagine, this caused some controversy but, while many have little positive things to say about him, Pope Vigilius is regarded as a valid pope, included on every list of the bishops of Rome. Subsequent papal elections were confirmed by the Byzantine emperors which, I can imagine, some may find an intolerable idea but this is probably due simply to ill-will generated by the eventual east-west schism since this idea never really went away. After all, in the Roman Catholic west, ultimately a number of monarchs held the power to veto papal candidates they found objectionable, meaning that whoever was chosen must have been passively approved of (otherwise his election would have been vetoed). In fact, this imperial veto was used for the last time in the conclave of 1903 when the first choice, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, was vetoed by Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, resulting in the election of Pope St Pius X.

The so-called “Byzantine Papacy” did not end until the reign of Pope Stephen II in 756. Prior to that time, the gains of Emperor Justinian had been rolled back and what was referred to as the Duchy of Rome (legally part of the [eastern] Roman Empire) was under threat from the Lombards of northern Italy. Constantinople was unable to help and the Pope turned to the King of the Franks, Pepin, son of the famous Charles Martel, to come to his rescue. He did so, the Lombards were defeated and in the subsequent peace treaty, only the “Romans, Franks and Lombards” were signatories, the Byzantines being left out completely. After the Lombards broke the treaty, attacked again and were defeated again, the King of the Franks ceded territory he had conquered from the Lombards to Stephen II which subsequently became the Papal States. Legally speaking, and this is why I warn Catholics about always trying to play the “legitimist” game, all of this territory was still part of the empire, having been basically stolen from the Byzantine emperors as the last Roman emperors still standing.

Their power, however, was gone and would not be coming back. From that time on, the popes would look to the west rather than to the east. However, that they had previously been imperial subjects cannot be argued against. Into the reign of Pope Stephen II, if not slightly longer, records were still dated by imperial years and imperial coins were still minted and dated according to the East Roman Empire. The ultimate change, of course, came when Pope St Leo III crowned another Frankish monarch, Charlemagne, “Emperor of the Romans” on Christmas day in the year 800. Again, if one chooses to play the strictly “legitimist” game, this was out of order as it had never been up to the Bishop of Rome to decide who the Roman emperor should be. This is, however, all I have been able to come up with in determining the root reason of why anyone would deny that the popes prior to this time had all been subjects of the Roman emperors in spite of the obvious history. I shall relate my theory and you may comment below as to whether you think it holds any water.

In the east, Church and State were firmly united. In the west, they were united as well but also fairly consistently at odds with each other and I think the perception of this has grown worse in modern times. The idea developed in the west of the “two swords” approach with the emperor (this being the German emperor) having the secular sword and the pope having the spiritual sword. However, the popes maintained that their sword was bigger than the emperor’s sword and that they could take away his sword if they wanted to because they had given it to him in the first place. I think this is magnified in our time because, basically, *everything* is or can be argued from moral grounds so that any issue can be considered a moral issue and thus falling under papal jurisdiction. All I have been able to come up with, to put it another way, is that there is a revulsion by some Catholics to the idea that the Bishop of Rome could ever, even in temporal terms only, be “subject” to a higher power, again, even if that power is only higher in terms of worldly power and nothing at all to do with spiritual power.

The Church was born into the preexisting Roman Empire. As such, the Roman emperors came and went and the earliest Christians and Christian bishops, had nothing to say about the matter. When the Pope crowned Charlemagne, this created a new western empire, which eventually became the German empire (First Reich) under the magnificent Kaiser Otto the Great, and a sort of “new world order” of which I am rather fond. However, it also led to a succession of troubles, most famous being the “Investiture Dispute” as the popes and the German emperors quarreled over where their powers began and ended. This is because this new imperial system had been handed down by the pope and what the pope gave, naturally, the pope felt he could take away. This is something no pope could or ever tried to do with the east because the eastern imperial succession predated his own, going all the way back to the first Augustus who was the Augustus before Christ was born. The Byzantine (East Roman) emperors had to be converted, confronted or submitted to, they could not simply be dismissed or overruled by the popes.

I think, at least this has so far been all I can come up with, the underlying reason for any denial that the popes were ever subjects of the Roman emperors which, like it or not, is an objective fact. It seems to me that some have become too attached to the idea of the popes being temporal sovereigns as they were in the era of the Papal States and since the recognition of the State of Vatican City because this has been so heavily emphasized as being absolutely essential to the independent function of the papacy as an institution, that it would be impossible for Catholicism to function without the popes being a power unto themselves. Personally, I do not think this view an incontestable one. Certainly it did not prevent any and all secular influence and I cannot be the only one who was outraged at the number of clerics implicated in child sex abuse crimes who escaped justice by being transferred to the Vatican establishment and thus beyond the reach of any secular government. However, the fact is that the papacy did exist for quite a few centuries without any secular power of their own, as subjects of the Roman emperors and it did not mean that they were simply the tools of Rome or Constantinople. What it did mean was that they had only their personal piety and courage to rely on. Those who were persecuted, exiled or martyred, I think, shows that such devotion was not unknown just as, I think, the amount of secular praise heaped on the current pontiff shows that independent sovereignty does not prevent a pope from giving in to popular trends or influence from beyond the Vatican walls.

For Further Reading:
Centrality of the Roman Empire
Church and Empire
Christian Empire
The Tiburtine Sybil & Imperial Prophecy
Christ and the Emperor Tiberius
The Story of the Byzantine Empire

Christianity and the Migrant Crisis

This has been an issue I have not been eager to expound upon but do so because so many have challenged my (very obvious and correct of course) remarks on the subject and it would be easier to simply have an article to refer them too with all of the proper Biblical citations. This has been coming up for quite a while, the issue that it is somehow a Christian duty to be in favor of open borders and allowing all and sundry into your country. This is not true. It is so manifestly untrue that it staggers the imagination that any serious Christian or anyone with any understanding of Christian Scripture could possibly believe it. Rest assured, I do not think they actually do as it is often the ones who are ordinarily the most anti-Christian who suddenly start telling actual Christians how to be ‘more Christian’ when it suits their political agenda. The really perverse thing is that, in this case, it is also an anti-Christian agenda.

I will address this primarily from a Biblical point of view because Christians have many different traditions but pretty much everyone has the same Bible and nothing I will be talking about will involve those books that are present in Catholic Bibles but missing from Protestant ones, so this does not devolve into a denominational food fight. There is actually nothing, at all, anywhere in the Bible that says one has to take foreigners into your country. You can read it from cover to cover, it is not in there. That being so, the proponents of open borders must cite other verses that they then ‘interpret’ to mean national borders should be abolished. They won’t come right out and say that quite often but when you say every country is entitled to have borders and set their own immigration laws but then oppose any and all efforts to actually enforce such laws, you are being dishonest and deceitful and I have heard many (usually Catholics) pull that trick. If you say you are for borders and for immigration laws but when someone crosses the border illegally they cannot be sent back, then you are not for borders and should stop lying.

Since the Bible does not say you must let any and all people into your country as they please, the people who favor this have to come up with something else and it usually comes down to only two or three verses that they repeatedly refer to. I cannot resist pointing out that there are more verses in the Bible that command people to obey kings and princes but I shall try to stay focused here. One of the most cited comes from very, very far back in the Bible, indeed almost to the book of Genesis which, by the way, pretty much all of these people believe to be completely fictions but I am speaking of Exodus 22:21 which says, “You shall not wrong a stranger (aka foreigner) or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” That is pretty simple, calling to mind the trials the Jews suffered in Egypt, it says do not treat others the way that you were treated. Do not oppress foreigners. The Jews, of course, were enslaved by the Egyptians and I don’t think anyone is arguing for the enslavement of foreigners. They want to keep the strangers out which, if they do, will certainly make it impossible to oppress them.

Everyone, presumably, knows the story of the Jews being in Egypt. The Patriarch Joseph became prime minister to the Pharaoh of Egypt and when famine struck the Jews, he gave them sanctuary in Egypt. After he died, the Jews were enslaved, Moses came and told the Pharaoh to ‘let my people go’ and God sent increasingly horrible plagues on the Egyptians until they finally did that and let the Jews go. As soon as they got the chance, all the Jews left, even digging up the bones of Joseph and carrying him away with them as well. The bottom line is, as soon as they were able, they left Egypt to go to their own country which is exactly what people who oppose open borders want too! They want these people to go back to their own countries. However, aside from the history lesson, if anyone quotes this verse, you might also put it in context for them by quoting the verse which immediately precedes it, Exodus 22:20 which says, “He who sacrifices to any god, other than to the LORD alone, shall be utterly destroyed”. Now, are most of these migrants Christians? No. Are they even Jews like the people in Exodus? No. You might ask the people who think Exodus 22:20 means to let anyone into your country if they then favor utterly destroying any of them who are not Christians.

The idea that the Old Testament commands mixing it up, promotes diversity or multiculturalism is so blatantly wrong as to be totally absurd. In speaking of foreigners in the “Promised Land” the people are told in Deuteronomy 7:3-4, “Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons. For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods; then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you.” You might also look at Joshua 23: 11-13, “So take diligent heed to yourselves to love the LORD your God. For if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know with certainty that the LORD your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you; but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the LORD your God has given you.” This is not exactly a call for inclusion and acceptance and there are numerous other verses that say the same thing.

Another passage, sometimes cited, is Leviticus 19:33 which says, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.” For context, the following verse says to love the stranger as yourself and calls to mind the exile in Egypt just as the passage from Exodus did. As with the first verse addressed, this one is basically the same. It does not say to let all foreigners come to your land, it does not say to give them your land, it simply says not to oppress them and this is very interesting for the ‘open borders’ crowd to cite today. I should hope no one would be in favor of oppressing anyone but it is the people who are pro-open borders who are usually the ones who say that White/Western/European people are inherently oppressive which then begs the question of why they want more people to come in to be oppressed? I also cannot refrain from pointing out, to all of these recent, Bible-quoting leftists, that the same people here being told not to oppress the foreigners are also people for whom slavery was okay. Indeed, in the chapter preceding that of the first verse we looked at, which would be Exodus chapter 21, it starts with regulations regarding the treatment of slaves. It is also worth pointing out considering the topic under discussion that what is detailed there is the treatment of Jewish slaves owned by other Jews as foreign slaves were treated differently from Jewish slaves.

I point this out simply to show that, very obviously, the Old Testament did not regard all peoples the same or interchangeable and also to point out how, certainly when it comes to things like regulations regarding slavery or animal sacrifice, we are assured that us modern folk are not bound to obey all these regulations. So, when these irritating things called facts are brought up, if the exchange carries on this long, the open-borders advocate will then shift to the New Testament if they had not started out there with a verse that is, if anything, even easier to toss around in any and all circumstances. It will usually be a verse such as or similar to Matthew 22:39 which says, “And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself”. This is really a fun one to get in to as, again, the person quoting it at you is inferring meaning into it which it does not actually say and has no idea of the context in which the verse is given because they don’t actually read the Bible.

You will notice that this, the second-to-greatest commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself does not say anything about letting throngs of foreign people who worship a different god into your country and giving them welfare payments, housing and medical care. It says to love your neighbor and loving your neighbor is free. We then might ask, as someone did to Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” Before looking at the answer Jesus gave, we should have some context because you really need to do that every time, it is very easy to pluck verses out of context to give people a false impression. Notice that in Matthew 19:19 the command to love your neighbor comes immediately after the command to honor your father and mother, which is to say your ancestors, your blood. Then, for even greater context, look back to the Old Testament to Leviticus 19:18 which says, very similarly, “You shall not take revenge nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD”. Your neighbor was your people, after your family, your wider family, your race or your nation, in this case the Jews were being told not to hold hatred against other Jews. The command from Leviticus to love your neighbor was literally a command to observe what the scholarly types call “in group preference”, the exact opposite of viewing all people as being the same and interchangeable.

The response Jesus gave was the familiar story I am sure everyone knows about “the Good Samaritan”. Jesus was speaking to a predominately Jewish audience and the Samaritans were probably the one group of people the Jews despised more than any other. They were effectively a schismatic sect of Judaism, usually described as being mixed race though this may mean mixed-ethnicity but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, Jesus was talking about a people who professed the same religion as the Jews but who were traditionally hated and shunned by the orthodox Jews. As the story goes, a presumably Jewish man was robbed and left half-dead by the side of the road. His fellow Jews walked by without helping but a Samaritan saw him and immediately stopped to help and was extremely generous to the injured man. Jesus then asked which had shown himself to be a good neighbor and the obvious conclusion is that it was the Samaritan. He saw someone who had been injured and helped him which, contrary to the way most twist this story, makes the definition of “neighbor” even more exclusive rather than inclusive, it is something determined by how you behave.

One might also point out that the Samaritan did not take the injured Jew home with him, tossing out his youngest child to give the man a place to stay and so on. The exact words of Jesus in this story is to help someone who has been attacked in your path, not to go out into the world in search of people who have it worse off than you and bring them home. This was effectively a lesson about reciprocity, which is the part everyone gets wrong because they invariably reverse the story. It was about who the neighbor is and the point was that the neighbor is the one who helped the injured man, the Samaritan proved himself to be a good neighbor by his deeds. This, in context with what Jesus had first said which prompted this question comes down to this: He said to love your neighbor as yourself and when asked who your neighbor is, the answer is a person who helps you when you have been attacked. The Samaritan did not help a man who had ruined his own life, he didn’t take the man home with him, he effectively rendered first aid (to a schismatic of his own religion). It is really not a complicated story and is rather simple. It also has more to do with mugging than with migration.

In Like 9:51-56 we see that Jesus sent two of His apostles ahead of him, while on His way to Jerusalem, to make preparations for a place to stay in a Samaritan village. The Samaritans, hearing that they were headed for the ‘rival’ Temple in Jerusalem, refused to welcome them and when the apostles asked if Jesus might not rain down some fire and brimstone on the Samaritans for refusing to receive them, Jesus said no and scolded them for suggesting such a thing. That is worth keeping in mind because, if one is a Christian, commanded to love everyone, the greatest act of love for a Christian is to save the souls of others from eternal agony by spreading the Gospel to them. At this point in human history, most of the world is probably aware of Christianity and the story of the Gospels. Most of those flooding into Europe certainly know about it but believe it to be wrong, adhering to the Islamic religion which claims to be the final word. So, keeping that in mind, we can see from the reaction of Jesus that raining down Hellfire missiles on these people’s villages would not be the Christian thing to do but we are also told very clearly how to deal with such people and it is not letting them take up residence in your country in massive numbers.

In one of the shortest books of the Bible we see very clearly how a Christian is to handle those who have rejected Christianity. 2 John verse 10 says, “If anyone comes to you bringing a different doctrine, you must not receive him in your house or even give him a greeting. To greet him would make you a partner in his wicked work.” That is when they come to you but the same holds if you go to them as Matthew 10:14 says, “And if anyone will not welcome you or heed your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town” or in other words, have nothing to do with such people. Do not harm, do not oppress, simply avoid. Do not associate with them and do not allow them into your home. Mark 6:11, Luke 10:11 and Acts 13:51 all say the same thing just in case anyone thinks I might be taking things out of context.

The final point that I think needs to be made, which all of this tends to broadly coincide with, is the notion that Christianity should not even acknowledge nationality but should instead embrace the revolutionary “brotherhood of man” type concept. According to this way of thinking, everyone is your neighbor and even your brother or sister. This is not only wrong, this is anti-Christian. The fundamental mistake that well-meaning people make in parroting this line is to confuse the flock with the faith. Christianity is for all people and does not change according to time, place or nationality. That is not the same as saying these distinctions do not exist and, again, the Bible actually makes clear that the exact opposite is true. How many times does the Bible reiterate the commandment to “Honor your father and mother” to receive God’s blessing? This, particularly in the Old Testament days when people lived much longer, is a command to honor *you* ancestors who are, obviously, not going to be the same as those of everyone else. The numerous genealogical tables found throughout the Bible also attest to the importance of your blood ties, your ancestry, the history and bonds of your family and your people.

Isaiah 51:1 says, “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, who seek the LORD: Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug.” In other words, honor your heritage, know the history, customs and traditions of your people, your ancestors. Nor can this be confined to the Old Testament as I Timothy 5:8 says, “If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” This means you take care of your own first, your own family and your own people are your first priority before helping others. This means that the “Good Samaritan” would not have been good if he had left his fellow Samaritans to starve so he could help the Jew on the side of the road. Although when it comes to the “Migrant Crisis” the focus is on Europe, this part is also very demonstrative for the United States and the influx from Latin America, all of which is Christian and has been for longer than North America. You take care of your own and it is precisely because Christianity is the same for all people in all places, that Christian mercy stuff does not just apply to Americans but applies to everyone south of the border too. You take care of your own, you do not shuttle them along for someone else to deal with for you.

However, on this issue the one verse that the “brotherhood of man” types invariably bring up is the line from Galatians 3:28 which says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” and, I must say, when it gets to this point you can start planning your victory dance because you are about to win the argument. This verse does not mean that all of these things are the same but that *Christ is the same* for all of them. There is not one Jesus for Swedes and another Jesus for Somalis, there is only Jesus. This is why, in Acts chapter 15, St Peter said that Christianity is not only for the Jews but for the Greeks and Romans as well and that they did not have to be circumcised. This is why Christians do not keep kosher, because such was not their custom, they did not have to become Jews in order to be Christians. Jesus is the same for all people everywhere but people are different and they do not have to all be made the same. Obviously, there were differences between Jews and Greeks as this shows, just as the distinctions between slave and free or male and female no longer ceased to exist. St Paul was approached by a runaway slave and he sent him back to his master, women were told to keep their heads covered in church and so on, there are numerous other verses showing that Christianity did not mean that men and women or different nationalities were all interchangeable but that the faith was the same and the need for the faith was the same for all people everywhere.

This is why, as with Christianity as I suppose it would be with anything else, you must take the entirety of it and not hand pick the bits out that please you. All people need salvation and that salvation is open to all but that does not change the fact that your family and then your people are your first priority. This goes back, again, to the “good neighbor” point. You cannot be a good Christian or a good neighbor on behalf of someone else. To say you will accept the responsibility of dealing with someone else’s problems is only to encourage them to carry on being a bad neighbor or a bad Christian or no Christian at all. Remember that Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with all your heart and then, secondarily, to love your neighbor *as yourself*. This means that loving your neighbor in the Christian context is predicated on loving yourself first and if you are displacing your own people for another, you obviously do not love yourself and are, therefore, incapable of loving your neighbor!

The Bible clearly does not teach that all the people in the world are the same and interchangeable. Far from that, the Bible teaches people to have “in group preference”. It says to honor *your* forebears, take care of *your* own family and *your* own people before taking care of anyone else, it says that the teachings of Christ are for all people and not for some people to observe on behalf of other people. It says that the greatest thing you can do is save others from eternal damnation but if people refuse that gift, you are to have nothing to do with them and not even wish them well as you would be wishing them well on a destructive path. For a Christian country such as Poland being asked to take in Muslim migrants, even being scolded by the Catholic hierarchy for being reluctant to do so, the simple fact is that the Bible says not to welcome such people at all, not into your country, not even into your home. There are many *extremely* wealthy Muslim countries which could be taking care of their own just as there are many countries in between Somalia and Sweden for neighborliness to apply. The point about Christianity and Christian morals being the same for everyone means that you take care of yours and that everyone else does the same. You cannot be a good neighbor *for* someone else and taking care of others before you have taken care of your own is specifically anti-Christian. As with so many things these days, actual Christianity is the complete opposite of what so many so-called Christian leaders say that it is. 

Confessions of a Creepy Christian

This is an “off topic” post, which I don’t do anymore but, because it is Halloween, I am making an exception, ignore it if you please. Halloween is hands down my favorite holiday and has always been so. It is the one time of the year when I’m considered “festive” and “in the holiday spirit” rather than just being “creepy”. My immediate family always celebrated Halloween but, going to a private, religious school most of the time as a boy, I became aware that some Christians have a problem with it. Not everyone does and no group seemed to be entirely consistent on the subject. At my school, when I was very small, Halloween was okay, to an extent, then later it was banned as being completely evil. There were Protestants who were okay with it, some who opposed it and I can remember one Catholic priest saying it was completely evil only to be replaced by another priest who said it was good and only anti-Catholics thought it was evil. Take your pick. My late mother always said, “it is what you make of it” and whether it was good or bad was entirely up to you.

What always bothered me though was the idea some Christian fundamentalist types have that Halloween is too “dark” to be compatible with Christianity. This bothers me because I want to be Christian but the Christianity of sunshine, light and happiness seemed to exclude me. According to my parents I’ve had my days and nights mixed up since the day I was born, the light hurts my eyes and, well, “happiness” is just a word that no one has ever associated with me. It also struck me as extremely bizarre given my understanding of Christianity. Here you have a religion that has as its symbol a method of execution, a religion based on God becoming man, being killed, having people poke their fingers in his gaping wounds and who commands you to eat His flesh and drink His blood. All of this, and you think **I’M** too “creepy”!? I wonder sometimes if people are reading the same Bible I have because, as I have often said, Christianity is a Lovecraftian death-match, not a hippy religion.

Some of this I have touched on before so I will not go through it all again but it seems to me that authentic Christianity is, to put it mildly, not for the faint of heart. The Bible describes eternal, celestial beings of another plain of existence locked in a cosmic struggle for domination, giant monsters, a witch summoning a ghost, dragons, people and animals being possessed by demons, people being raised from the dead and I could go on at length about the angels, as I have somewhat before on these pages. Some of them do or can look like us, sure, but the description of them in their own habitat is terrifying. Some have bestial bodies, three heads, lots of wings, others are constantly engulfed in flames, some are giant wheels covered with eyeballs and so on, real nightmare fuel. They kill children, slaughter armies by the thousands and, you will notice, even when appearing on a happy occasion, always start by telling the person they are appearing before to stop being afraid. They are not chubby, flying babies folks. If you ever see an angel that is not ‘under cover’ you will most likely drop to your knees in mind-melting terror.

It does not stop with the scriptures either, then you get into the traditions of the early Church and there are plenty of horrifying stories to choose from there. Ever heard the story of St Margaret of Antioch? She was eaten alive by a dragon, used a cross to tear her way out of its stomach, was drowned, survived, burned alive, survived and then finally beheaded. The apostle St Bartholomew was skinned alive, St Christopher became a sort of godly wolf-man, St Denis had his head chopped off and just went on preaching, carrying his cranium around with him and I know someone is thinking, ‘well those are just stories, they cannot possibly be true’. To which I say, is any of it any more impossible to believe than Jesus spitting in the dirt and curing blindness with the mud, raising a man from the dead who was already half rotted away or there being a colossal sea serpent at the bottom of the ocean that God is going to come down and kill with a giant sword at the end of the world? Because all of that stuff is in the Bible and I should think any Christian would have to believe that.

Authentic Christianity, as I understand it, has nothing to do with this modern day collection of churches full of “nice” people who are all about sunshine and social justice, who think demons are just metaphors and God is so loving that He would never actually condemn anybody. Yes, God does love everyone but in a way that is far beyond our understanding. As far as being so loving as to never punish anyone, ever, all I can say is to tell that to the population that drowned in the flood or the parents of all the dead Egyptian children wiped out by an angel because their Pharaoh would not release the Israelites from bondage. God is not your BFF in the sky, God is not your “copilot” and God is not your ‘buddy’. God is beyond our comprehension, God is unfathomable to us and His ways are not our ways. God is omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-seeing) and omnipresent which, to put it in an unusual way but one which I prefer, is to say that God is so huge that He fills the entire universe and is everywhere at once. God is fair, God is just but if you think he’s too nice to punish you, just remember that when Jesus Christ died on the cross the sun was blacked out because God the Father turned His back on His own Son because he had just taken on the sin of every person to ever exist.

Yet, people who presumably believe in all of that, people who will walk around every day with a tiny image of a dead man nailed to a cross hanging around their neck, will tell me I’m “creepy” or “morbid” or some such thing. It really is incomprehensible to me other than that the vast majority of people do not really believe what they claim to. Perhaps I am totally wrong and it really is just me that does not fit and cannot accept it, however I cannot help but think we must be reading from two completely different playbooks when it comes to the Christian religion. They are in the Christianity of Joel Osteen and I’m in the Christianity of church buildings made out of dead people.

This surely must sound like a rant at this point but, I promise, I am not going off-topic today merely to vent my frustrations. I do have a story to tell which, I have found out lately, does not seem to be very well known even among life-long Christians. Yet, to explain how we get there, I did want to put this background in place and also call to mind a previous explanation I have given on these pages. My late grandfather was in the habit of giving people very distinct nicknames and these nicknames, in my immediate family anyway, tended to impose on us a certain “theme” if you like. My oldest sister, for example, had a nickname which caused the cartoon character of Tweety Bird to become her sort of mascot and over the years she accumulated as gifts just about every imaginable collectible featuring the sharp-tongued yellow canary. My nickname, on the other hand, caused me to accumulate over the years a similar assortment of things like skulls and skeletons and this also came to include items of a religious nature.

Although rare today, once upon a time it was fairly common to see crucifixes with a skull and bones at the bottom of the cross. Eventually, these were, I think, most often used only to place on the coffins of the deceased prior to burial but I doubt they are even used for that anymore. In any event, I have about four or five crucifixes like this and anytime anyone sees one it usually prompts a reaction such as a comment about it seeming morbid or macabre (which, again, I would think the dead deity hanging above it would take the prize for but, apparently that is just me). Today, I admit, it does stand out but this was not always the case but because it has effectively fallen out of use, people do not seem to understand the symbolism of it and the story behind it which, I think, is a beautiful one. There is, of course, the general symbolism of the skull and bones being a symbol of death and being shown at the bottom of a crucifix because the sacrifice of Christ defeated death, He triumphed over death and gave to all the chance of eternal life. That is simple enough to understand but it actually goes deeper than that.

Those of you who have read the Bible will likely be aware that the hill upon which Christ was crucified was called Golgotha and you might also be aware that this name translates as, ‘the place of the skull’. What you may not know, however, is how that hill got such a name. It was called that because the people of that time believed that beneath that hill was buried the skull of Adam, the originator of the human race, the man crafted by God’s own hand. Is this story true? Certainly, I cannot say for sure but I like to believe it as not only do I find it beautiful but I also think it makes a sort of sense. The beauty is that Christ, the perfect man who redeemed humanity, was sacrificed at or near the spot where Adam, the fallen man who condemned humanity, met his ultimate end. There is a sort of completion and perfection in that which I find impossible to resist. Whether the skull of Adam was actually down there or not, I have no idea but I do think the belief that it was is something not ridiculous to believe. After all, it was obviously called that before Christ was crucified there and so it had to have been the Jews who named the hill “the place of the skull” and the Jews would certainly not have invented such a story which would fit so perfectly with Jesus being the Son of God, something which goes against their entire being as they are. If anything, they would have had every reason to re-name the place and suppress such a story.

That is my story for today and I will leave you with this; God is beyond our comprehension and we cannot put the Almighty in a box, we cannot have borderlines around the infinite. Much of what scares us usually comes down to death and as someone who has had to say goodbye to most of my family by now, I can tell you that it is sad but the whole point of Christianity is that it should not be frightening in and of itself. The dark things that so many ‘sunshine and lollipop’ Christians would shun are things which are at least not bad, sometimes quite beneficial and important up to a point to at least teach us that evil exists because the real harm from demonic forces comes when people no longer believe they are real. I would ask you to think on that and, if you ever happen across one of us who prefers candle light and chanting in dead languages to guitars and clapping, be tolerant of the “creepy” Christians that are still out there.

Happy Halloween from
The Mad Monarchist 💀

Photo Gallery of Dead Royalty
Profile of The Real Count Dracula
The Blood Countess
A Macabre Monarchist?
Mad Rant: God Ain't Fuzzy!

Church and Empire

Today, liberals love to talk about the “separation of church and state” as being something great, something which ended religious wars in the western world and which they take sole credit for. The more atheistic liberals think this is good because it prevents the state being dominated by organized religion and the religious liberals like it because it prevents the churches from being dominated by the government. In this regard, the religious liberals have a powerful arsenal to defend their case by pointing to the state churches of northern Europe which preach a pale, so watered down as to barely qualify as Christian form of Christianity and which practically no one attends as opposed to the United States where, while still rapidly declining, church attendance is comparatively robust. However, the problem with both arguments, though the atheistic liberals in particular, is that no separation of church and state really exists in the western world, even in America. To go even further, such a thing has rarely existed even from the beginnings of Christianity.

In virtually every major religion, church and state have almost always been very closely linked if not, in some cases, one and the same. This is true in Confucianism, Shinto in Japan, Buddhism in places from Mongolia and Tibet to Thailand and of course it is also true in Islam. Traditionally, it was true of Judaism, in a way even more so than in Islam as it was a religion, a way of life and a people. For Christianity the proponents of the separation of church and state usually point to Christ’s command to, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” as some sort of “proof” that Christianity uniquely requires a separation of church and state. Of course, that is both silly and nonsensical as religion tends to be about setting standards for what is right and wrong, what is good and evil and obviously no one is going to be okay with thinking that the way they do things is good but that the way the government does things is evil. In historical terms, Christianity did not remain separate from the state in the slightest for very long at all.

Emperor Constantine the Great

Christianity first became a legal religion, recognized and tolerated by the state, when Emperor Constantine the Great issued the Edict of Milan in 318AD. One only had to wait until 380AD for Christianity to become the official state religion of the Roman Empire by the order of Emperor Theodosius I. Yet, even before that happened and to be a Roman was to be a Christian, church and state were not kept separate at all. Emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, saw Church “interference” in the state with the Emperor changing Roman laws to reflect Christian morality such as by abolishing death by crucifixion, ending gladiatorial games and making Sunday a day of rest. Likewise, the Emperor also intervened in religious matters, most significantly by calling the First Council of Nicaea which famously produced the Nicene Creed which provided a simple definition of what Christianity was and what all Christians were expected to believe. It is also important to remember that all of this was done well before Emperor Constantine had actually been baptized as a Christian himself (something he waited to do until he was on his deathbed).

It is evidence of how far modern Christianity has drifted from its original, traditional, roots that all of this is mostly unknown to modern Christians but the Roman emperor was seen as an extremely significant, even essential, figure for the Christian religion. The early Christians and Medieval Christians certainly understood this which is proven by the long tradition, today almost completely unknown, of prophecies, visions and other miraculous events concerning the Roman emperors. Regular readers will know as I have talked about these before such as the Emperor Augustus being revealed a vision of the birth of Christ, the Emperor Tiberius being moved to forbid any persecution of the Christians or the Emperor Marcus Aurelius putting a halt to such persecutions after witnessing a miracle in battle called down by Christians within his army. There was even a legend in the Middle Ages that Pope St Gregory the Great had momentarily resurrected Emperor Trajan in order to baptize him and spare this model ruler from the torments of Hell.

Emperor Basil I

As I have said before, whether one believes these stories or not is irrelevant to the central point. If you do believe them, obviously the Roman emperors had a spiritual significance for Christians from the very beginning, of both the Roman Empire and the Christian religion. However, even if you do not believe them and think they were invented later, that they were invented still shows just how significant the Christians of the early Church and Middle Ages considered the imperial line to be. The emperors were not seen as purely secular figures with no connection to religious matters. It is worth remembering that, after the Council of Jerusalem, the first seven Ecumenical Councils of the Church were called not by the Pope or some eminent Patriarch but by the Roman Emperor, indeed, all seven were called by the Eastern Roman Emperor. Likewise, the eighth Ecumenical Council was called by Emperor Basil I as well as the Pope, the ninth (Lateran I), called by the Pope after the “Investiture Dispute”, dealt with the imperial role in appointing bishops so that, even when church-state relations had been bad, there was still no getting around the fact that the emperors were major figures in the Christian religion. Lateran I was also attended by the King of France whose position, likewise, was inseparable from the faith of his country.

The fact that the Investiture Dispute happened in the first place is evidence of the fact that church and state were not separate and that no one could imagine them fully being so. This occurred during the imperial reign of the Salian Dynasty but was to come up again, in a way, during the subsequent reign of the Hohenstaufen Dynasty. Emperor Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa), feeling himself affronted by Pope Alexander III, earned the eternal wrath of the Catholic Church by taking the side of Anti-Pope Victor IV against him. However, he had initially tried to remain neutral, advised the bishops in his lands to do the same and refused to recognize either papal claimant, calling for a council to be summoned to decide the matter. When Alexander III refused on the grounds that the pope cannot be subject to the decisions of a council (and being rather unpopular likely fearful of the outcome), it was only then that Emperor Frederick gave his support to Victor IV. He did this because of the long history, again, going back to Constantine, of the Emperor being so significant a figure in the Church. In his view, if the Church could not sort out its own problems, the Emperor must step in to decide the issue.

The coronation of Charlemagne

This was the root of the problem, however, as the popes did not wish to be subject to a council or any other authority, nor did the emperors wish to agree to the idea that they owed their crown to the pope who could then take it from them if the pope so wished. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, such disputes, were effectively political and not of a religious nature really. In the earlier times when councils were called by the Roman Emperor, and when even the popes were regarded by the eastern emperors as being one of their subjects in secular terms, these councils dealt with heresies or other questions of a religious nature. For the Roman Pontiffs and the German monarchs of the “Holy Roman Empire”, on the other hand, politics was usually at the root of the issue. That being said, any political dispute could always be cast in a religious light even if for no other reason than that it came down to a question of authority and as the pope could always cite that the law of God was above the law of man and that he was the sole arbiter of the law of God, his ruling on any matter at all had to prevail and so he made any issue a religious issue simply by being involved in it.

Although doctrinal disputes certainly exist, it is also true that a major foundational reason for the very existence of two distinct versions of the Christian religion, one eastern and one western, is due to the fact that the Western Roman Emperor was eliminated and only the Pope remained whereas, in the east, the Emperor carried on being the one expected to maintain discipline in the Church, summon councils and so on as had been the case before. When a new version of the empire was revived in the west, with the coronation of Charlemagne, it was initiated by the pope and later disputes arose because what the pope had given, the pope felt entitled to take away, in addition to the fact that he had gained land, subjects and political power and was thus a political player for the first time. The popes, though they tried, could never have the same sort of disputes with the eastern emperors given that their reign extended back to the original Roman Empire, predated the papacy and was not therefore in the gift of the pope to give or to take away. What neither ever did was to presume you could have one or the other and still have traditional Christianity as it had been handed down to them.

Emperor Justinian

Even when Pope Gelasius I (492-6) first tried to define the limits of the two powers, “which govern the world: the sacred authority of the bishops and the imperial power” it was at a time when the western half of the Church was displeased with the eastern half and while this was later used in the Middle Ages to bolster the papal case against the German rather than Byzantine emperors and could be considered a prototype of the ‘separation of the church and state’ argument, the fact which should be most obvious is that the pope was admitting that the imperial authority was a given, that it had its limits as he saw them, but it was there nonetheless and could not be denied or disregarded. Not long after, the issue of imperial authority was at the root of one of the earliest, if not the very first, contested papal elections with one faction more loyal to the Emperor in Constantinople and wanting reconciliation and the other more comfortable with the Gothic kings and wishing to maintain their ground in the east-west dispute. Many of the Roman/Italian nobility wanted to reconcile with the east while the lower classes tended not to. This was all the more noticeable when the Latin and westward-looking Justin came to the throne in 518, followed by his nephew Justinian in 527, who brought back the flavor of the old Roman Empire and served to highlight the Germanic origins and habits of the Gothic kings.

This period, specifically because it was so troubled, inadvertently highlights the importance that the imperial monarchy had for the Church. Whereas the Gothic west had largely fallen under the sway of the Arian heresy, King Theodoric the Great being an Arian, the east remained more solidly of the old faith. Pope John I, though old and frail, was dispatched to Constantinople to persuade the Emperor to stop being so harsh and discriminatory toward the Arians. Imagine that for a moment, the Roman Catholic Pope went to the Byzantine Emperor to plead the case of the Arian heresy! How successful he was seems to be somewhat in dispute, some accounts saying he did get the Emperor to back off the Arians somewhat, others saying Justinian committed to nothing substantial and sent him home. In any event, it did Pope John little good for King Theodoric had him arrested soon after returning, fearing that he had been plotting with the Emperor against him to retake Italy and the frail, old pope died in captivity. Nonetheless, there was some balance, there was recourse if one side got out of line.

Coronation of Emperor Otto the Great

The benefits of this arrangement were certainly seen in the time leading up to and around the year 1000 when the Church, certainly in the west, had become infamous for its corruption and depravity, yet this was also when great monarchs provided an impetus to change. It was the time of High King Brian Boru of Ireland, King St Stephen of Hungary, Emperor Otto the Great of Germany, St Vladimir the Great the Grand Prince of Kiev who converted the Russians, King Canute the Great of Denmark and King St Olaf II of Norway. At a time when the papacy had sunk to its lowest point, it was the pressure of Emperor Otto III which brought a pious and determined man to the Petrine Throne (Sylvester II, also the first French pope). Had it been left solely up to the clerical leadership of the time, Christendom would likely not have survived as so many of them had become far too weak and corrupted. Some may, perhaps, find something familiar about this situation.

I have said before and will go on saying that for the majority of Christian history none of the faithful would have been able to imagine having Christianity without an emperor as an integral part of the picture. I am also firmly convinced that it is no coincidence that Christianity is in such a sad state today when an emperor or even anything of the sort has been absent for so long. The enemies of all I hold dear about western civilization certainly recognized that taking down the imperial power would aid in taking down the spiritual power as well. This is not, however, to say that they are solely responsible. If everything had been working as it should have been, I don’t think they would have stood a chance. In the west, the papacy certainly did a great deal of damage to the traditional hierarchy for the sake of politics only to find that not long after the empire ceased to exist in any way other than a name the papacy itself no longer had much real influence either, having frittered it away by constantly shifting positions. Now the spiritual authority of Christianity is, I think, in real danger of being lost and there is no emperor to come to the rescue as in the days of Otto III.

Emperor Valentinian II

Hopefully, the above will demonstrate one more reason why Christians should take monarchy seriously and not see it as something set apart from religion. Even if your monarch is far from the Christian ideal (as most are these days), rest assured that this is nothing new. Even when Julian “the Apostate” tried to restore Rome to paganism, it did not cause Christians to abandon the idea of having an emperor. Christianity was a product of the Roman Empire, Christ was born in the reign of Augustus, died and was resurrected in the reign of Tiberius, and so it went with His followers. St Paul preferred to appeal to Nero rather than place his fate in the hands of the Jews and, according to Josephus at least, Nero’s wife may have been a Christian. The religion won recognition under Constantine and became the official religion of the empire under Theodosius. For some, reading the funeral oration of St Ambrose of Milan for Emperor Theodosius or Emperor Valentinian II may be enough. We can see there and in numerous other ways that from the beginning, Christianity, born of the empire, was seen as being inseparable from it and the empire inseparable from the faith. If those early Christians were right, it can only then mean that the majority today are very wrong to say otherwise.

More along these lines:
The Tiburtine Sybil & Imperial Prophecy
Christ and the Emperor Tiberius
Christian Empire

The Fascist Debate and Christianity

It has become painfully obvious to all by now that our political discourse in the United States has degenerated into an argument over who the “fascist” is. The Nazis have also recently replaced Russia as the looming bogey man of American political discourse with accusations and counter-accusations of the left and right being the “real” Nazis. The term “Nazi” is used by both sides interchangeably with the term “Fascist” as if these two things were one and the same. Rather than debate ideas or principles, we seem to spend our time arguing over who is or is not a “fascist”. The Democrats say that the Republicans are “fascists”, that President Trump is a “fascist” and the more extreme members of the progressive left have even formed a group called “Antifa”, which is short for “Anti-Fascist”, to combat any Republican, conservative, or whomever they consider at all ‘right-wing’ who are all, to their mind, “fascists”. Prior to World War II, there were many such groups, usually organized by the local Communists of a given country and the members of “Antifa” today are modeling themselves after those people.

At the same time, the Republicans have responded to this by arguing that they are not “fascists” but that, rather, it is the Democrats who are the “fascists”. They point to the behavior of “Antifa” and say that the “Anti-Fascists” are the *real* “fascists”, that they are the ones behaving like “fascists” and so on. There is a similar back and forth over who is most similar to the Nazis. Trump is called a Nazi or a Neo-Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer by the Democrats while the Republicans continue to argue that the Nazis were leftists and that no one on the right could possibly be a Nazi because of that. Rather, they implicitly argue, it is the left in this country which is most like the Nazis with each side refusing to even consider the possibility that the Nazis were a different sort of thing, taking ideas from both sides and thus neither entirely on the right or the left. It can, and has, become extremely tiresome as both sides accuse the other of being Fascists and both sides accuse the other of being most like the Nazis, the Nazis being the secular replacement for the Devil, who no one believes in anymore, as the representation of pure evil in the world.

Thus, our political debate has been reduced to shouting at each other, “you’re a fascist!” and, “no, you’re a fascist!” ad nauseam. The left will have an easier time of this since the right, by responding the way that they do, implicitly accept the leftist standard of judgment. They have, effectively, decided to play the left’s game according to the left’s own rules and it is hard to imagine how that could ever work out well for them. They could, and with more justification, accuse the left of being Communists and/or Stalinists but they do not because, again, they have accepted that the Nazis and/or Fascists were the worst people in the history of the world, the representation of absolute evil and thus calling them Communists would not pack the same punch. The difference is that the right recoils from the accusation of being Nazis or Fascists while the left does not recoil at being called Communists or Socialists. The Republicans spent eight years calling Obama a socialist and when his term ended the Democrats very nearly nominated an open and avowed socialist to replace him. The term obviously does not repel them in the least.

No, the mainstream right, and not just in America, has a problem because, according to their own ideals of classical liberalism, what the left wants does not seem that out of order. They have already conceded the ground on too many key points. If, after all, we are all “created equal”, then it does not make sense that some do better than others and seems perfectly reasonable for a powerful state to intervene in order to restore that mythical inherent equality. If America, or any other western state, is a “nation of immigrants” then it does seem rather arbitrary and capricious to say you are only arguing over matters of procedure and paperwork. If you concede complete freedom of religion, and equality and the “brotherhood of man”, anyone can become a citizen of any country so long as their paperwork is in order, it does seem like only blind bigotry which would motivate you to say the Muslims should be given a bit more scrutiny. No, do that, and you just might be called a Fascist and, apparently, the worst possible thing to be in our current liberal, democratic, republic is a “fascist” and we are locked in a cycle of accusing the other side of being that most terrible of things.

Now, for the left, the revolutionary, republican, secularist types, this makes sense. They have also long embraced “identity politics” and are very definite about whose side they are on. If your identity is that of a non-Caucasian race, a non-Christian religion or a non-traditional sexual orientation, they are for you but if you are any of those things, not so much. The right, on the other hand, tries to argue against all identity politics while at the same time inherently running into the problem of what it “means” to be an American. From what I have seen, the fall-back position seems to be Christianity or, as they often prefer, “Judeo-Christian values”. While still trying to argue that you can be any religion or of no religion at all, they say that these Christian values are the core of who we are and we must get back to them as the basis for the only proper sort of identity. Frankly, that sounds rather impossible to me and rather at odds with their agreement with the left that the manifestation of absolute evil in political terms can be lumped together under the label of “fascist”.

Remember, after all, that National Socialism and Fascism are actually not the same thing nor did they behave in exactly the same way nor were either of those identical to any of the other regimes currently given the blanket classification of “fascist”. They certainly did not have the same sort of attitude when it came to religion, the dominant religion in all such countries being Christianity. In “fascist” Spain, General Franco was the savior of Christianity, delivering it from the atrocities of the Second Republic which killed more people in a matter of months than the supposedly notorious Spanish Inquisition killed in as many centuries. The “fascist” Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania had Orthodox Christianity as one of its foundations and required all members to be willing to die for Christ. The leaders of both of those movements were also monarchists. The very pro-Christian “Austrofascist” leader Kurt von Schuschnigg had agreed to a restoration of the monarchy, which we have discussed before, and the “fascist” regime of Salazar in Portugal was very pro-Christian and at least friendlier to the idea of monarchy than any government in the Republic of Portugal has been before or since. Given all of that, I can only believe that if anyone understood Fascism, I do not see how actual Christians could consider that the worst thing in the world to be, certainly worse than our own regime.

From a Christian point of view, one could go back to the Roman Empire which the faith was born in and converted for the image of an ideal state or the medieval specifically Christian monarchies which rose up after it but neither of those are on offer today and, indeed, are intentionally ignored. They are certainly not attacked the way that the Nazis or the Fascists are, though they have and would be, but more than that the ruling elite seems to not want them to even be considered. So, for a sincere Christian living in the modern, liberal, democratic west, it seems hard to understand how the term “Fascist” could be regarded as the ultimate evil. I say this because, in any way in which I would measure a society by the standards of traditional Christianity, the one actual, honest to goodness state which was truly Fascist, the state in which the dictator of the country was the man who actually invented Fascism, Benito Mussolini, seems inarguably more Christian than our own celebrated and beloved liberal, democratic, union of republican states. Fascist Italy was, of course, none of those things. It was certainly not liberal, Mussolini emphatically despised liberalism, nor was it democratic as several years into his tenure Mussolini banned all parties but the National Fascist Party and it was not a republic as Mussolini, though dictator, was only the head of government and not the head of state, which was the King of Italy.

That must sound shocking but, I can only ask you to consider a few facts about this terrible, nightmarish dictatorship known as Fascist Italy which was so bad that it has become our primary political epithet. Consider it, particularly, from a traditional Christian perspective. In Fascist Italy, divorce was illegal. Abortion was illegal, gay “marriage” was certainly illegal and homosexuals or trans-genders and everything of that sort was nowhere to be seen. Men were encouraged to be masculine, women were encouraged to be feminine and the tax code encouraged people to get married and have large families, to, ‘replenish the earth’ if you like. Christianity (specifically of the Roman Catholic variety) was the official and sole religion of the state, Christian religious classes were mandatory in all Italian schools, the local form of Christian worship (the mass) was even declared, “central” to national life in Fascist Italy. There were also, by the way, no mosques in Rome (though there were Christian churches going up in Libya, Eritrea and Somalia) just as there were no gay bars or trans-gender bathrooms. Oh, and there were no Satanists giving the opening prayer at city council meetings either.

All of that was in Fascist Italy under the dictator Mussolini and in every one of the examples cited above, the modern United States of America is exactly the opposite. We do have democracy and we also have “no fault” divorce, we have abortion and call it a fundamental right known as “women’s reproductive health”. We have gay “marriage”, homosexuals parading through the streets, in every walk of life and on practically every television show. We have trans-gendered people, gender-fluid people, men who want to be women and women who want to be men. We have a welfare system that discourages marriage and in which only the relatively wealthy can afford large families and these people are told not to bother anyway because large families are bad for the environment. We have a “wall of separation” between church and state, we have banned religion from the schools to an extent that the Bolsheviks would find quite familiar. Whereas in Fascist Italy a crucifix had to be displayed in every classroom, in modern America even a silent prayer is strictly forbidden. Far from being central to national life, Christian worship is discouraged and, indeed, fewer and fewer people bother doing it. Yes, there was also recently a city council meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado at which the opening prayer was given by a Satanist, praising reason and light and ending with a heartfelt, “Hail Satan!”

These are the facts of the matter and so, I would say again, to consider who had the more Christian society; Fascist Italy or the modern United States? Then, ask yourself, if you are a Christian certainly; why is it that we consider the Fascists to be the epitome of evil and ourselves as the “shining city on the hill”? It may not be pleasant to think about but I think it would be worth it. After all, notice that the Satanist in Colorado was able to say “Hail Satan” and not a single finger was laid on him by any Christian. Try addressing any city council in the western world and ending your remarks with “Hail Hitler” and see how far you get. To me, this reaffirms my theory that no one really believes in Satan anymore, even the so-called “Christians” of the Republican Party. Everyone, however, believes in Adolf Hitler, we take that guy very seriously indeed. Obviously, Christianity can be a powerful basis for a country, because it has been for centuries of western history. However, what these milquetoast conservatives are peddling is not Christianity. We know that because, if we judge our republic as we judge a tree by its fruits, we can see that it could not have been founded on Christianity in the first place. If it had been, well, it would not have been founded at all as the New England rabble rousers would simply have, ‘rendered unto King George the things that are King George’s and to God the things that are God’s’.